Guild Wars 2

New content is great and all but this is as good a chance as any to start talking about substantive overhauls to the actual content. The way I see there are a number of issues that have never really been resolved even in three years:

Condition damage
Condition damage currently suffers from several major issues:
- Cap of 25 means that pretty much all conditions will be maxed out on any high-HP mob in zerg content.
- Condition damage can’t crit, which means that it’s always going to be weaker than direct damage. This isn’t really good balance because it unbalances it in both PvE and PvP (in PvE, it’s useless because you want max DPS, while in PvP it’s overpowering because it only requires investment in one stat).
- Weapons and weapon pairings that deal both direct and condition damage are generally going to suck because direct damage requires investment in three stats, and on top of that hybrid weapons generally deal less condition and direct damage than “pure” direct damage or condition weapons.

Accordingly, I propose:
- Add a new condition called Deep Wound which can be applied by certain skills, and which is applied automatically when bleed/torment reaches 25 stacks (in PvE only). When Deep Wound is applied, affected mobs instantly take the total damage from bleed/poison/burn/torment whenever they are applied.
- Get rid of condition damage and merge it into the power stat. This will allow hybrid weapon combos to function better, and open up more viable weapon pairings.
- Allow conditions to crit. Obviously overall condition durations and intensities need to be adjusted on some weapons to match but this will both make conditions less OP in PvP (since they now require investment in two stats instead of just one) and stronger in PvE (since they can deal more overall damage if you also invest in precision).

Ferocity
Ferocity/crit damage is a bad stat overall, simply because it’s a pure damage stat yet we already have a pure damage stat (power). The fact that you can stack both of these stats to get super high damage, coupled with the fact that defense generally isn’t necessarily since most damage can be negated or dodged, means that Berserker and Assassin are pretty much the only two good gearsets for PvE, with the others sort of being “for fun” or “learning tool” sets. I propose simply getting rid of ferocity altogether (and adjusting weapon damage as necessary to compensate), which means that even if you spec full DPS, you still have the option to choose at least one other stat to build. For example, a DPS-specced class might choose condition duration to get more condition damage, or he might choose boon duration to get more buffs on allies, or healing power to help give allies more breathing room for mistakes, etc. It’s still a “DPS meta” but it’d be a lot more varied that the current “berserker or kick” meta.

Healing power
Healing power is generally the “useless stat” unless you’re running a full troll build like Nomad or something. The problem actually isn’t because the poor scaling but the fact that you generally don’t have enough opportunities to make use of it in general. Heal skills tend to have long cooldowns, or alternately requires you to sacrifice a huge amount of DPS to sit in a healing weapon (i.e. water attunement anything, or engineer medkit, etc.) when you should really just be dealing damage if possible. On the other hand, regeneration gets applied a ton passively, but the fact that it ticks for so little and stacks only in duration means that the benefit you get from healing power is going to be extremely minor. The easy fix would be to make regeneration stack in intensity instead; there’s plenty of ways to apply regeneration and it scales well enough with healing power that it might actually be worth taking healing power as the third stat in a DPS spec (see also removing ferocity, above).

Damage traits
+% damage traits are dumb and boring but they’re almost always the best choice in PvE, unless there’s something else that could be traited to boost damage even more. They also don’t scale conditions which again contributes to the direct/condition damage imbalance. PvE ele builds are literally nothing but stacking as many +% damage traits as possible. Seriously, take that kitten out. I don’t care if they all get replaced by fall damage traits, it’d still be more interesting than a build where 10 of your 14 trait points are all the same “Deal +% damage when ______” kitten.

Necromancers
Seriously, give these guys some kind of damage-boosting Order skill or something. Maybe give them a trait that puts the Signet of Vampirism effect on everything they hit. I dunno but these guys are long overdue for a PvE buff.

I’m surprised this post hasn’t gathered more support.

Especially the comment on hybrid weapons, look at so many of the ranger weapons, especially mainhand axe and crossbow it’s just awful. Or the bleed leap on pets when cats are power based. Or elementalist’s awful earth attunement or water scepter.

Autoattacks in generals need to be balanced.

Warriors and thieves have really high autoattack damage on many of their weapons.

Warrior weapons are all focused as well, as are thief weapons. You only need one stat investment to make them shine, and even on warrior main sword where there’s a power skill, all warrior weapons have enough high base damage numbers that even their condition weapons hit hard with their power based skills.

Then you have necromancer staff, a weapon with basically 4 skills which deal with conditions, and the staff autoattack is power based. And necromancer scepter has a skill that’s power based.

Necromancers and mesmers also have terrible minor traits. Necromancer small heal on mob death, 7% of power converted to healing power? gain 1 puny stack of might when hit at 25% health? It’s garbage.

Mesmer get a bunch of short duration vulnerability stacks on dominance, which are just bad in pve.

Then you have pets, which need their aoe avoidance in pve and wvw already.

Mesmers need to have their shatters reworked for PvE, shatters are always a dps loss as a mesmer compared to phantasms, and the fact that illusions despawn after mob death really screws over mesmer dps in PvE even though mesmer dps is already really low.

Ranger pets all need to hit 3 targets with their auto-attacks baseline, they need to not be animation locked when attacking so targets dont just move away out of their range while they attack.

Ranged ranger pets need to attack from 1200 like the ranger can, the ranged disparity only puts them closer to a zerg, and their pathing from fort walls need to be fixed. Sic em needs to not break F2 skills.

Group utility also needs to be spread around. Ele, warrior, and guardian can all bring high boon stacking for a group on top of projectile deflection or many blast finishers.

Meanwhile mesmers, necromancers, and rangers bring few fields and garbage finishers/boon provision.

Conditions are indeed weak.

Ferocity is fine as it is.

Healing power is useless because it should be useless: anet stated many times that they don’t want parties to be unable to complete content due to lack of healer

Damage traits may be “boring” but they’re what determines a class’s viability and usefulness. So they’re fine.

And necromancers are indeed weak right now.

An acceptable solution to 4/5 of these would be to allow heals and conditions to crit. Then ferocity would apply to conditions and heals, so condi would be a bit more viable and lmaohealer builds can put out more healing (making themselves feel good, but ultimately still remaining useless, as it should be)

As for necros, idk maybe give them some party wide support that doesn’t overwrite every useful field in the game.

they should just remove the cap in PvE somehow, that’s the main problem, boosting conditions in any way would just make them even more OP in PvP than they are now…

Conditions also need to work on objects (they also need to fix pets and summons of all kinds to attack objects properly, while I’m at it).

[Quote]Healing power is useless because it should be useless: anet stated many times that they don’t want parties to be unable to complete content due to lack of healer[/Quote]

What’s ironic is that the support they give to necromancer is basically “Party healing” and at the same time they don’t want “party healing” being effective. Truly a bad move.

Hybrid damage weapon :
From my point of view, there shouldn’t be DD weapon or Condition weapon. They should all be hybrid and balanced around that. This wouldn’t pigeonhoing people in [whatever weapon] if they want to play condition damage or direct damage.

Necromancer :
Necromancers need to be usefull in party. They are already in a pretty good spot in WvW and they hold there own in PvP. By the way someone point out that dark field could become interesting for burst blind spam when we will need to break the breakbar.

Lorgus.6148:

Conditions are indeed weak.

Ferocity is fine as it is.

Healing power is useless because it should be useless: anet stated many times that they don’t want parties to be unable to complete content due to lack of healer

Damage traits may be “boring” but they’re what determines a class’s viability and usefulness. So they’re fine.

And necromancers are indeed weak right now.

An acceptable solution to 4/5 of these would be to allow heals and conditions to crit. Then ferocity would apply to conditions and heals, so condi would be a bit more viable and lmaohealer builds can put out more healing (making themselves feel good, but ultimately still remaining useless, as it should be)

As for necros, idk maybe give them some party wide support that doesn’t overwrite every useful field in the game.

I can see this being a good stopgap fix for PvE but I don’t think it should apply to PvP where being a tanky healer with conditions is already rather strong.

As for a way to fix bleeds. If you look at most bleeds in game you will notice something, they are all either applied multiple stacks at a time & or last a good duration per application.

If they were to look at each thing that can apply bleeding then cut either the duration or number os stacks applied then up the scaling it would go a long way to fixing bleeds in PvE.

For burns, a simple solution would be to have a check system in place. The check would be rather simple. Is the target your applying burning to already suffering from more then X seconds of burning ? if yes then you instead apply 2 stacks of torment for the same duration as your burn would have been.

Bam problem for bleeds & burns more or less solved.

For other conditions, I don’t really see a way to fix them.

Ragnar the Rock.3174:

Bam problem for bleeds & burns more or less solved.

not really, your solution just created different problem… you obviously underestimate the number of conditions people generate in a big event, you would end up with a burning, bleeding and torment cap after a while…

also burning theoretically doesn’t need any fix, because it stacks in duration and it doesn’t really matter if the duration is 30sec, 1min or 10min as long as it’s up all the time… but from another point of view, it’s quite bad to have only 1 burning even when there are 10 people applying it, I understand the cap is required for PvP or even dungeons, but it just doesn’t work in an open world PvE with many players attacking the same target…

Where in this game is PvE content hard enough to need a discussion about it’s “balance”?

Condi players want equal damage footing with Zerkers is NOT a “balance” discussion (and neither is whining for PvE Necros…..of which I am one).

OP gives a great summary. Personally I don’t know why RNG crits were added like any other generic RPG, they didn’t have anywhere near the same presence GW1 and it’s an impediment to the ‘action’ direction of GW2. Ideally I’d like to see crits turned into skill and trait based triggers rather than an awkward % based thing. Unfortunately that’s not going to happen.

The refusal for a PvP/PvE split and balancing accordingly makes conditions another big problem, they’re already great in WvW/PvP.

We definitely need more exciting traits. I don’t mind the +% for a specific weapon if it’s also providing something unique, hopefully new ones along side specialisations can help alleviate this.

Healing power is always going to be useless in PvE and hard to balance in PvP. The celestial meta showed how it can be a significant boost on Warriors and Eles. It may be useless but I’d rather see they use their resources to balance other things.

I definitely agree that Necromancers need a different type of support and had the same idea of orders being a great opportunity for support beyond the standard might/fury stacking. The weird support-healer stuff they’ve tried to press on to the profession doesn’t even work for PvP and has 0 place in PvE.

Aretak.3826:

OP gives a great summary. Personally I don’t know why RNG crits were added like any other generic RPG, they didn’t have anywhere near the same presence GW1 and it’s an impediment to the ‘action’ direction of GW2. Ideally I’d like to see crits turned into skill and trait based triggers rather than an awkward % based thing. Unfortunately that’s not going to happen.

The refusal for a PvP/PvE split and balancing accordingly makes conditions another big problem, they’re already great in WvW/PvP.

We definitely need more exciting traits. I don’t mind the +% for a specific weapon if it’s also providing something unique, hopefully new ones along side specialisations can help alleviate this.

Healing power is always going to be useless in PvE and hard to balance in PvP. The celestial meta showed how it can be a significant boost on Warriors and Eles. It may be useless but I’d rather see they use their resources to balance other things.

I definitely agree that Necromancers need a different type of support and had the same idea of orders being a great opportunity for support beyond the standard might/fury stacking. The weird support-healer stuff they’ve tried to press on to the profession doesn’t even work for PvP and has 0 place in PvE.

Conditions are only good in WvW as a roamer spec, not in a zerg.

With the guardian and ele and warrior trains all farting boons and condition removal faster and more often than a necromancer can strip and reapply is the very reason why everybody stacks on the boon heavy classes while the condi & strip classes like necromancer and mesmer suffer, and even ranger because rapid fire isn’t going to make you useful in a large scale battle when your pet is still dead 24/7 and ranger/necro/mesmer have all terrible aoe and provide few useful group buffs/blast fields/blast finishers.

And I can’t fathom who would think necros are fine in spvp. Necros are just an inferior engineer. Engineers can apply a wider variety of conditions than necros, bring more hard CC, and ironically are more survivable than the class with no escapes or immunities.

I think “exclusive stacks” are the way to go. What I mean is, just like damage, the instances of a condition are unique to you (like how in wow you can have multiple fire mages with ignite on target and not get overwritten). The stacks you apply contribute to your DPS and don’t effect any other. The “Stack limit” could be there for the person but not for the whole zerg. Also crittable condis would be completely op if we ever get a precision, ferocity, condi damage armor set.

Overall condis are pretty decent in the SPVP arena where people kite like nothing else and projectiles are kinda hard to land. WvW won’t see any change because the WEG condi strip groups is a player thing and not something you can actively dis-incentivize without gutting the class in sPvP. so this would be a PvE only change (and armor set if that stat combo came into being)

As long as crit damage/chance remains and conditions are percentages instead of numbers there will be no balance. Other stuff has well but the funny thing is you can be full dps with 3 stats doing the same while for tank/healing/condi you can’t . The first mistake was the dps and solo play favoritism.

Lorgus.6148:

Healing power is useless because it should be useless: anet stated many times that they don’t want parties to be unable to complete content due to lack of healer

I’m neither agreeing or disagreeing with your opinion/perspective on Healing/Healing Power, nor will I blindly pontificate on precisley what Arena Net’s vision of how healing should or shouldn’t function within Guild Wars 2 is or isn’t.

However if we allow your presumption that healing power is intended to be (completely) useless, then it should simply be removed from the game. After all, what is the purpose of a purposeless stat?

But given that the stat does exist, and will likely continue to exist (after all, Arena Net continues to release more Stat Combos that include it), I would then argue that the stat should perform its presumed function: improving abilities that heal.

Sidestep for a moment the oft discussed “Zerker > All therefore defensive stats shouldn’t exist at all” arguments we see everyday (as we’ve seen time and time again such arguments require entire threads for themselves, lol). The reason Healing Power is currently “useless” is because there are so many Weapon Skills, Utilities, and Traits that scale so poorly with the stat that the difference between 0 Healing Power and 1000+ Healing is almost completely negligible. It’s absolutely staggering.

If the stat is going to continue to exist in game (an assumption I feel safe making), then I would argue that Arena Net needs to do a sweep of all these skills and seriously consider adjusting the base healing values, scaling values, cool downs, and durations of these abilities to find a new balance: players who invest their time and resources into the Healing Power stat (wether we believe they should be or not) should, quite reasonably, expect their healing Skills, Utilities, and Traits to be better than those who don’t.
As things currently stand, they very much do not in the majority of cases.

As one last, final note, it is my individual, personal opinion that the core of GW2 is strong enough that such adjustments could be made without making “Healers” a necessity.

There are 2 ways to look at this imo… you mentioned Necro and Mesmer as being 2 of the weaker condi damage classes. The reason for this is because both have poor coverage and both stack damaging condis very slowly. Contrast this to an Engineer that can get nearly every condi imaginable on a target in one hit and max bleeds with little real effort.

So overall you could either bring the Mesmer and Necro up to this level, then adjust conditions overall since all of the classes are more or less equal. But this is quite difficult imo.

Alternatively, you bring the other classes down to where the Mesmer and Necro are, stacking bleeds to 25 and burst condis no longer are as large an issue outside of 5man content, and then it simply becomes an issue of adjusting damage upward to better compete with power alternatives.

Now that said, so long as conditions primarily have a single feeder stat whereas power damage has 2, things will never be balanced properly. I honestly don’t know why they didn’t just remove crit dmg as a stat when they had the chance. They could have given classes traits to increase crit damage above the base 50% and could have used this to flesh out class identity. Give Thieves 50% dmg on melee weapons. Rangers 50% dmg on ranged. Warriors 25% on all etc etc.

Once this was removed, it’s simply a matter of allowing conditions to crit and both sides of the coin are even.

Even as a berk necro I had to go through 5 fractal 50 joins where I was instantly kicked as soon as I finished loading in, before I got into a fractal 50 run that didn’t kick.

In arah it’s the same, fractal 50 and arah are scumbag central. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a more vile and sociopathic community, and I’ve raided in WoW top 50 guilds the people there aren’t even as close to kick happy even when carrying some random pug in a dungeon.

There was this arah run today where the mesmer basically kicked everybody and ended up himself alone. My suspicions is it was just pretext to use people to clear parts of the run for him so he could sell the path later.

This game has balance issues, because:

• Not all Stats of the Game are same as valuable to Character, because just only a few of them share synergies with each other and that in a way too good kind of way, so that the other Stats do look compared to that synergy like obsolete, what is the reason of the whole Berserker-Meta due to Condition Damage, Vitality, Healing Power and Toughness having no synergy with each otjher, like Power synergizes well with Precision and Ferocity.
  The Stat System needs a redesign drastically together with removing Stats from Equipment, Stats should come automatically when leveling your Character up and not mainly from Equipment. Equipment should be more there for nice Special Effects, but not for Stats (like giving Equipment for the removal of the Stats a second Rune/Sigil/Gemstone Slot) When it comes to Stat Boosts, Accessoires should be for that mainly

And GW2 should get some more Stats to make Balancing easier, because with some more Stat Types, could become Power alone lesser important

• Next point why GW2 has balance issues is due to the game having tons of useless traits and utility skills, where alot of them belong merged to create new space for some better and more useful new traits and utilities, that could help in balancing the classes better

• The game has balancing issues, due to the game havign some too powerful Buff Items, or simply allowing Buff Items where they should be better disable, like in WvW there hs buff items nothign to search, WvW does provide already its own Buff System with the Shrines and the WvW Skill Buffs, that should be enough, theres no need to have Buff Food and Potions also too in WvW what rises the power creep there only more and makes balancing in WvW a real issue especially with buff food, that reduces condition durations by whopping 40%!!

• The game has balancing issues, because not all classes are by their design simply made for it to defend places very effectively (what is relevant for PvP), some classes are just by their design simply better for it and classes like the Elementalist are simply when build for defense still too powerful in dealing massive damage at the same time why having super superior regenerative and control skills at the same time, due to the reason, that they can switch way too fast between their elements.
  in GW1 was this spammy attidue balanced with the Exhaustion mechanic and thats exactly what Elementalists need to get again to balance their skill spam attitude to stop them from spamming douzends of skilsl in cycles mindlessly… and that alot faster, than any thief can spam attacks, which is automatically balanced because of initiative running out very fast that way too..but eles can just keep on spamming their skilsl in cycles, because theres nothign that stops them from doing so, because when they are done with an element, the next is always ready to attune to

Then there are classes, that offer absolutely to nearly nothing for group support, like the necromancer or use A.I mechanics, that are totally underpowered, have bugged A.i are die way too easily due to having no protection agaisnt AoE spam and don’t dodge/move out of them, while their own attacks are super weak compared to those of the player, which is the reason why we dont see many guardians with their spiritual weapons, or many eles with summons or many necros with minions

I hope this will change wit HoT, as it seems the game will receive with HoT massive A.I improvements for bosses and hopefully too all summon skills, so that something like necromancer minions won’t be just simple targets for a thief for exampel to get easy stealth, but are some dangerous threats due to them having powerful attacks and an A.I. that controls them also good in combat, so that they don’t die so quickly anymore.

However, Ithink specializations in the future will also do somethign for a better game balance in overall.

Lorgus.6148:

Healing power is useless because it should be useless: anet stated many times that they don’t want parties to be unable to complete content due to lack of healer

Yes, they stated they don’t want parties to be unable to complete content due to lack of a healer, they never said that they’re going to make healers useless. I’d say they pretty much achieved that. Healers aren’t useless in this game, it’s just that they aren’t necessary at all in dungeons and mostly just slow down the run, but make it easier. In other modes they’re also completely fine. I don’t believe healing power is useless either, especially not in PvP.